After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive a music beyond the limitation of sound. The book is titled After Sound because music and sound are, in my account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike equate music with pure instrumental sound, or absolute music, I posit a conception of music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, conceptualism, and installation while they articulate a novel artistic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term critical music, this book examines a diverse collection of art projects that intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploiting music’s unique historical forms. Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the global visual and performing arts of the past ten years—Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Wandelweiser, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Cassie Thornton, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz—After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic neo-absolute music that dominates new music circles today.

Critical music is not a fixed object of study, but rather a mutable site for resistance; it recomposes music’s codes, materials, and forms and listens for strategic assemblages and formations in the making. Consider, for example, John Cage’s silent composition, 4′33″, performed alongside statements made on the AIDS crisis. Or witness a group of artists staging a punk prayer in central Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Hear a concerted scream by a group of artists saddled with student debt, or see a video documenting listening and recording exercises conducted by retired sugar factory workers in present-day Taiwan. A common feature uniting these scenes exists not only in their individually expressed senses of political urgency, but also in the insistence upon a broadened musical field necessary for their adequate contextualization and analysis. Here this terrain covers the themes of collectivity, language, authority, speculation, and sense, and is mapped through engagements with poststructuralism, queer theory, and new materialist philosophies. The artworks in After Sound interrogate music’s historical modes of technological reproduction and elaborate new modes of instrumentality. They refigure music as a site for political agency by challenging and exfoliating its forms.

G DOUGLAS BARRETT is an artist and writer working with music, time-based media, and performance. His artistic projects combine techniques from the visual and performing arts to address issues related to identity, temporality, property, and exchange. His writing has been published in journals such as Postmodern Culture, Contemporary Music Review, and Mosaic. In 2009 Barrett received a DAAD research grant to Berlin. In 2013 he received a Franklin Furnace Fund performance art grant. Currently a resident at USF Bergen, Barrett is a 2015-2017 Schloss Solitude fellow. His first book, After Sound: Toward a Critical Music, is forthcoming on Bloomsbury Press (2016).